VLC for Unity now supported on Linux

131 points37 comments12 hours ago
tmtvl

On a similar note: Godot VLC (<https://github.com/xiSage/godot-vlc>), because let's not pretend we don't remember the Unity terms change controversy.

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martz

Recently added support for Linux to VLC for Unity, with full hardware decoding.

It uses OpenGL rendering through GLX and EGL, with DMA-BUF texture sharing to pass video frames efficiently to Unity’s renderer.

Only x86_64 is supported at this time. In the future, I will add ARM64 support as well as Vulkan.

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Hendrikto

To everybody else being confused: This is about Unity the game engine, not Unity the desktop environment.

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fusslo

Can a unity dev/game dev help elucidate why you'd use vlc in unity?

For cutscene playback?

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jokoon

I don't know why, but on windows, the first time I start VLC after a windows boot, it takes about 5s to 8s to open a video file, any sort of video file

I suspect it's a graphics driver issue, or something else

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hparadiz

VRChat folks will love this. Videoplayers are embedded into Unity scenes aka "maps" as a regular imported lib. The videoplayer is a drawn surface where users can see video playback. Most commonly used for streaming live music from a stream like Twitch.

torginus

Forgive me for my ignorance - but my understanding is that VLC is a frontend for ffmpeg, and even ffmpeg is 'just' a wrapper for hardware video decoders such as NVDEC when viewing supported codecs, like h264/5.

maxlin

I wish Unity's built-in videoplayer wasn't such a disappointment. The performance on Windows is god awful. Have had to write a mass video reference recompressor/in-scene replacer that just attempts to pick the best compression flags and reduces resolution just avoid dropping frames playing ~1080p videos on multi-core PC's with discrete GPU's. Mac was fine playing even the overly high res original footage, high 2000+ pixel portrait tutorial videos.

Wrote a proper double-buffering video/audio player in Unity using parts of an ffmpeg wrapper over ten years ago. Seems silly they never did anything similar officially, just used lackluster platform API's.

happyPersonR

Sidenote:

Video game programming with unity was an absolute nightmare to try and get working with any kind of gitops and or with multiple people working on the same code base a couple of years ago

Wonder if that changed ?

ekjhgkejhgk

Blocked because I don't use cookies. Ok, I've always preferred mpv anyway.

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